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The reference biography of Kim Il Sung is "Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader" by Dae Sook Suh. A relatively fair treatment of the man given that the author i

The reference biography of Kim Il Sung is "Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader" by Dae Sook Suh. A relatively fair treatment of the man given that the author is notable for his anticommunist bias: https://www.amazon.com.au/Kim-Sung-North-Korean-Leader/dp/0231065736 https://www.amazon.com.au/Kim-Sung-North-Korean-Leader/dp/02... I can also recommend Kim Il Sung's own autobiography, With The Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Century (wiki page has many links to the full book). Because it was written by Kim himself, it's a lot less hagiographic than what you might expect (he didn't have to worry about censorship). Plenty of embellishments sure, but also shows a very human picture of the man. To give a bit more historical background on the conspiracy theory: Kim's anti-Japanese actions in the 1930s-40s had received some coverage in the Korean press - despite Japanese censorship. He went into hiding in the USSR in the early 40s and was sent back to Pyongyang by the Soviets a couple months after the August 1945 liberation of the peninsula. Dissatisfied with their first choice for a North Korean leader (a man named Cho Man-Sik), the Soviets intended to replace him with Kim (a convinced Stalinist) after some PR efforts to bolster his public image. At Kim Il Sung's first public appearance at a rally in Pyongyang in late 1945, people were shocked by his young age (there are several testimonies from people present at the event attesting to this). This was exploited by the anti-communist South to discredit him, claiming that someone that young could never have done the resistance deeds that people had heard about during the colonial period. As Suh's book shows, however, there is a good amount of evidence to support the fact that he was indeed a leader in the resistance against Japanese colonization (albeit not the only one) with several feat of arms (albeit not nearly as many as later claimed).

baybal2 4y ago
cgb223 4y ago
> wiki page has many links to the full book The netsec person in me says we probably shouldn’t be downloading PDFs/epubs from the servers of literal North Korean Government sites…
- nickelpro 4y ago
  Respectfully, what do you imagine the attack vector would be?
  - muricula 4y ago
    A zero day bug in the pdf parser or javascript engine of your browser. Such bugs are common enough that the North Korean military is believed to use them to gather intelligence and for theft, but also are rare enough that they're going to use them on just anyone.
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      I thought North Koreans don't know how to use computers? Remember the Kim Jong Un memes around that? I'm frankly getting tired of all the hysteria. If that is indeed the attack vector just use a sandbox and a pdf viewer with low featureset. Is all we do nowadays mindless hysteria? EDIT: comical. the response to the advice to use a PDF viewer with low featureset is to list Acrobat exploits. Seems like in the hysteria about how terrible "our enemies" are, all sarcasm and absurdity is lost
      - blu_ 4y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group https://www.cvedetails.com/product/497/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader.html?vendor_id=53 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/497/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader....
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Saying the inverse of what you actually believe but with a tone that suggests insincerity isn't comedic. It's just obnoxious.
        rjzzleep 4y ago
        I can see why calling out the hypocrisies of the hysteria of people like you would seem obnoxious to you. EDIT: Comical indeed that MichaelCollins feels the need to come to muruculas rescue. The thread didn't start with murucula, it started with people saying they should not open NK PDF's because they're dangerous. The mindless hysteria could only have been trumped by people accusing one of China and Russia stoogedom in the comments below. I was merely referring to the memes that were so popular in HN circles just a few years ago about how Kim Jong Un was too stupid to use a computer[1]. I have no skin in the game, but if the HN crowd is not able to read a PDF with basic Opsec to protect itself from malicious Acrobat exploits, we don't really deserve to be called hackers. [1] http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/styles/1200x680/public/kim-jong-un_0.jpg http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/styles/1200x680/publ...
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Im not convinced. The Chinese communist party celebrates itself for its resistance against the japanese all the time, when one reads the history though, it gets obvious that the brute of the fighting was done by the nationalists and the communists then only performed a cleanup operation, engaging in no major battles. These rewritten heroic-historys are largely worthless.
- sofixa 4y ago
  The Communists didn't fight major battles against the Japanese, they didn't have the resources for that after the Nationalist purges and civil war. But neither did the French resistance against Nazi Germany, does that mean they didn't resist at all? The Communists used guerilla tactics, to much success in some cases. Who did more to stifle the Japanese war effort is an impossible question to answer, but both sides of the Chinese Civil war contributed in the fight, each to their own strengths.
- pattusk 4y ago
  Korea hardly had any nationalist armed resistance by the 1930s. The nationalists camp had either turned to peaceful resistance a la Ghandi (Cho Man-sik), exile (Syngam Rhee) or collaboration (Lee Kwang-su, Ch'oe Nam-Seon and so many others). Kim Il Sung participated in two attacks on the Japanese in the Korean Peninsula confirmed by modern historians (at Hyesan and Pochonbo, the latter of which may have been led by someone else) and other attacks in collaboration with the Chinese communists (see book above for details). For those wondering why Korean nationalists would have become collaborators: they thought colonozation by an Asian race was less likely to erase Korean culture than colonization from a white race (as the nationalists believed a Japanese defeat in the pacific war would lead to Western colonization of East Asia)
  - permo-w 4y ago
    >the nationalists believed a Japanese defeat in the pacific war would lead to Western colonization of East Asia culturally, in many ways it did
- elzbardico 4y ago

baybal2 4y ago

cgb223 4y ago

> wiki page has many links to the full book The netsec person in me says we probably shouldn’t be downloading PDFs/epubs from the servers of literal North Korean Government sites…

nickelpro 4y ago
Respectfully, what do you imagine the attack vector would be?
- muricula 4y ago
  A zero day bug in the pdf parser or javascript engine of your browser. Such bugs are common enough that the North Korean military is believed to use them to gather intelligence and for theft, but also are rare enough that they're going to use them on just anyone.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    I thought North Koreans don't know how to use computers? Remember the Kim Jong Un memes around that? I'm frankly getting tired of all the hysteria. If that is indeed the attack vector just use a sandbox and a pdf viewer with low featureset. Is all we do nowadays mindless hysteria? EDIT: comical. the response to the advice to use a PDF viewer with low featureset is to list Acrobat exploits. Seems like in the hysteria about how terrible "our enemies" are, all sarcasm and absurdity is lost
    - blu_ 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group https://www.cvedetails.com/product/497/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader.html?vendor_id=53 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/497/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader....
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Saying the inverse of what you actually believe but with a tone that suggests insincerity isn't comedic. It's just obnoxious.
      - rjzzleep 4y ago
        I can see why calling out the hypocrisies of the hysteria of people like you would seem obnoxious to you. EDIT: Comical indeed that MichaelCollins feels the need to come to muruculas rescue. The thread didn't start with murucula, it started with people saying they should not open NK PDF's because they're dangerous. The mindless hysteria could only have been trumped by people accusing one of China and Russia stoogedom in the comments below. I was merely referring to the memes that were so popular in HN circles just a few years ago about how Kim Jong Un was too stupid to use a computer[1]. I have no skin in the game, but if the HN crowd is not able to read a PDF with basic Opsec to protect itself from malicious Acrobat exploits, we don't really deserve to be called hackers. [1] http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/styles/1200x680/public/kim-jong-un_0.jpg http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/styles/1200x680/publ...

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Im not convinced. The Chinese communist party celebrates itself for its resistance against the japanese all the time, when one reads the history though, it gets obvious that the brute of the fighting was done by the nationalists and the communists then only performed a cleanup operation, engaging in no major battles. These rewritten heroic-historys are largely worthless.

sofixa 4y ago
The Communists didn't fight major battles against the Japanese, they didn't have the resources for that after the Nationalist purges and civil war. But neither did the French resistance against Nazi Germany, does that mean they didn't resist at all? The Communists used guerilla tactics, to much success in some cases. Who did more to stifle the Japanese war effort is an impossible question to answer, but both sides of the Chinese Civil war contributed in the fight, each to their own strengths.
pattusk 4y ago
Korea hardly had any nationalist armed resistance by the 1930s. The nationalists camp had either turned to peaceful resistance a la Ghandi (Cho Man-sik), exile (Syngam Rhee) or collaboration (Lee Kwang-su, Ch'oe Nam-Seon and so many others). Kim Il Sung participated in two attacks on the Japanese in the Korean Peninsula confirmed by modern historians (at Hyesan and Pochonbo, the latter of which may have been led by someone else) and other attacks in collaboration with the Chinese communists (see book above for details). For those wondering why Korean nationalists would have become collaborators: they thought colonozation by an Asian race was less likely to erase Korean culture than colonization from a white race (as the nationalists believed a Japanese defeat in the pacific war would lead to Western colonization of East Asia)
- permo-w 4y ago
  >the nationalists believed a Japanese defeat in the pacific war would lead to Western colonization of East Asia culturally, in many ways it did
elzbardico 4y ago